Everywhere in the definitively digital world of today, data constitute primary material. The flood of information creates new opportunities, such as business. These mass data redefine the way scientific knowledge is created and also offer companies new growth levers.
The crossing of data streams which now irrigate many sectors, in particular the economic field, must access information of an inaccessible systemic nature in each data stream taken singly. The semantic Web offers a framework for implementing this crossing.
The standards of the semantic web are starting to be widely disseminated and stabilised (RDF, OWL for representation of data and metadata, as well as protocols for exchanges, essentially HTTP). They were created for easier interoperability and data exchange. The Web has effectively become the preferred source of data and the most dynamic site for exchanges. The provision and promotion of open or semi-open public data, their combining with industrial data and the tools for exploiting them are progressive drivers in the emergence of a major lever for dynamising the economic sector, for instance.
The work of collection, integration, analysis, use and viewing of data is being systematised by many players. Today it relates largely to “cold” data or those evolving minimally over time. But a new interest is manifesting for “hot” data, therefore close to real time, which pose new problems and require new approaches.
Some components or tools for processing Open Source or commercial data streams already exist. This is the case, for example, for triple stores and execution engines of SPARQL requests (request language).
But, with current volumes of data streams, their number and their variety, current techniques and tools are no longer capable of responding to user demand.